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Title: Britain's Best
Author: Pringle, Henry Fowles (1897-1958)
Date of first publication: 1931
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York: The New Yorker, 19 September 1931
   [Profiles]
Date first posted: 17 November 2010
Date last updated: 17 November 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #658




Britain's Best

by Henry F. Pringle

19 September 1931

When she was thirteen years old and classified by a Canadian
lyceum bureau as a "serio-comic singer" with a refined
repertoire, Beatrice Lillie underwent baptism as a
professional actress. This was by the traditional ordeal of
being left stranded in a small town because the villainous
manager of the troupe with which she travelled had absconded
with the funds.

The incident was less than tragic, however. The elocutionist,
the humorist, and the pianist who, with the serio-comic
Miss Lillie, made up the troupe were not forced to walk the
ties back to Toronto, nor were their trunks held by the hotel.
A telephone call to Harry Rich, Miss Lillie's first teacher,
was greeted with a delighted "Well, you're actors now" and
a telegraphic remittance of one hundred dollars. Instead of
coming home at once, the four full-fledged actors spent the
weekend sightseeing.

* * * * *

Today, as Lady Peel, wife of Sir Robert Peel and an actress
whose talents are fairly certain to bring success to any
revue, she remembers a dozen such incidents of her
barnstorming childhood. There is nothing to indicate that
elevation to the British baronetage has any reality whatever
to her. "I was Lady Peel," she will say lightly after she
has returned from a dull evening at some formal party, and
makes it apparent that she will avoid the rôle whenever
possible. But the stage has reality and so had her
childhood. In Canada, where she was born, just as in the
United States, the period from 1905 to 1910 was one of
conscious elegance. A pleasing voice was an asset to a
serious vocalist, which the youthful Beatrice was in due
time to have become, but eloquently graphic gestures were
essential. Refinement which would protect "the sensibilities
of the most delicate," to recall a phrase of the era, was
required as a matter of course, and so was an extremely
sticky sentimentality. Out of this grew the Beatrice Lillie
of that first, well-remembered "Charlot's Revue." Therein
lies the genesis of her rendering of "There Are Little
Fairies in the Bottom of My Garden," a song exhumed last
winter at the suggestion of the regal Ethel Barrymore.

When she sings this song and when she resurrects, the
sentimental favorites of 1910 for the amusement of her friends,
Miss Lillie is really gilding with her individualistic brush the
serio-comic singer who once toured eastern Canada. This
might be viewed as pathetic but for the fact that, at
thirteen, Beatrice also thought these songs absurd. Her
outlook then was not different from now; only more
suppressed.

On one occasion her mother, who was a soprano and who often
sang on the same program, was concluding a tender number
when Beatrice sneaked up behind the black velvet drop and
whacked her with a broom. The song ended on a very high note
indeed. Almost invariably, investigation would show that an
actress was persuaded to go on the stage through the
influence of some determined mother. In Miss Lillie's case,
however, the result has not been exactly in accord with
maternal anticipations. It is very much better.

* * * * *

Any star who has made huge financial successes of two or
three Broadway shows in six years and who is equally popular
in London is a major celebrity. Add to this the dazzling
fact--dazzling to the world of the theatre--that she is an
absentee British Lady who actually does know the Prince of
Wales, and her cash value to a musical-comedy producer is
clear. Success, though, has brought none of the normal
hardness and she is not shrewd at all. Her weekly salary in
the "Third Little Show" is probably three thousand dollars a
week. Last winter she was starred at the Palace and is said
to have been the highest-paid artist in vaudeville; she
rejected an offer of ten thousand dollars for an additional
week and sailed for London. She gets twenty-five hundred or
three thousand dollars a week for entertaining in night
clubs.

Beatrice Lillie remains perfectly helpless in business
relationships, in her contacts with other people, in her
social life. A merely good-natured young woman would get
into trouble through inability to say no when the agent of
some producer appeared with a contract. Beatrice finds it
equally difficult to say yes, and so says nothing at all;
even an agreement which she wants to sign will lie around in
a confusion of papers for days or weeks. She is an easy
victim for appeals for financial assistance, although she
frequently suspects that the petitioners are professional
mendicants. Almost every night for weeks, for example, the
same beggar appeared out of the traffic congestion at the
Manhattan terminus of the Queensboro Bridge. Miss Lillie, en
route to the theatre, would insist that her escort give him
a half-dollar. "It makes me feel better," she explained. She
says this is not superstition, a common characteristic of
stage people. She boasted for years that she was not touched
by this trait and probably thought she wasn't. Not long ago
she realized, however, that she had made her way from her
dressing-room to the stage by exactly the same route every
time she appeared. She had followed this route on the
opening night and had been afraid to vary it for fear it
would spoil her luck.

* * * * *

An apartment in town in East End Avenue, a house at Sands
Point on Long Island, and lavish expenditures for clothes
eat into Miss Lillie's large earnings. She has no faint
notion where her money goes. Sadie Welsh, an English girl
who alternates as maid at the theatre and business
representative, writes the cheques which Beatrice signs. "I
really ought to examine the vouchers at the end of the
month," she admitted vaguely when some orderly-minded
adviser protested paternally that this was a lax
arrangement, that no one would know the difference if Sadie
or the bank made a mistake.

The similar confusion which attends her social life is
primarily due to a horror of being left alone. She is likely
to be unhappy and nervous when she is alone, and to obviate
this possibility she surrounds herself with innumerable
people, largely from the theatre. Her dressing-room is
filled with them; before, after, and during the show. The
house at Sands Point is a gathering place for the stage
celebrities of Port Washington and Great Neck and for a
great many others who are not celebrities at all. On Sunday
afternoon and evening as many as fifty may drop in for a
buffet supper, at which, if she can, Miss Lillie eats her
favorite dish--boiled beef. Afterward new songs or skits,
which sometimes appear in a Broadway show at a later date,
are enthusiastically offered by their creators. At the
moment, Miss Lillie is experimenting with a ventriloquist
act, in which she is the doll, that is as funny as anything
she has done. Lazy to a degree--she likes to arrange stage
numbers so that she can sit down whenever possible--she also
has the restlessness of a sparrow. She is never quite happy
unless some party has been arranged for after the theatre.
She likes few women, but she will discuss her private
affairs with a congenial man the second or third time she
has seen him. She dislikes nearly all games excessively.
Rarely reading anything except the tabloids and badly
informed on nearly all subjects, she particularly detested
the question-and-answer parlor games so popular two winters
ago. She never writes letters. She hates to have her
photograph taken, protesting that her nose is too big and
that she is not really pretty.

All this is part of an inherent disinclination to do things,
complicated by a need, which is almost desperate, to have
things going on around her. She swims rather badly, and is
afraid of the water. She has acquired none of the British
delight in hard riding or tramping over moors. She has,
however, one gift: she is an excellent shot. This was developed
by going, after the theatre, to Sixth Avenue shooting galleries,
where she is known and admired by all the proprietors. And
yet, with all her helplessness, Beatrice has resisted the
importunings of Earl Carroll to add her distinction to one
of his "Vanities." He has asked her repeatedly; she has always
been intelligent enough to turn him down.

* * * * *

Three or four years ago, visiting Toronto, Lady Peel was
taken on a tour of her native city by the local committee of
welcome. Would she pose for a photograph in front of her
birthplace, they asked. The implication was that some
historical society would one day place a tablet on this
shrine. Lady Peel murmured that she would be pleased to do
so, and as the motor passed a particularly impressive
mansion she pointed to it. The car was halted. She draped
herself against a stone pillar at the driveway, with only
the faintest Bea Lillie expression on her face to give
warning, and the result was solemnly published in the
Toronto newspapers. The palace was, of course, not her
birthplace; she had never seen it before. She was born in a
less affluent part of the city in 1898. Her mother was of
English-Spanish origin and her father an Irishman who had
been an army officer in India and who held some vague civil
post connected with the provincial jail. There was another
daughter, Muriel, and the mother was determined that both
girls should have professional careers. In the face of this
determination everything else gave way, although Beatrice
was briefly educated at St. Agnes' College, a nearby female
seminary.

Beatrice, although she had a moderate interest in music, was
a born mimic. The incidents now remembered all relate to her
talents along that line. She recalls that any neighborhood
funeral inspired her to borrow her mother's long skirts and
black gloves and that she would join the mourners in staring
solemnly at the deceased, with whom she had rarely enjoyed
acquaintance. She liked to give imitations of such local
characters as the fruit-and-vegetable man, an Italian. Early
tendencies to clothe these characters with humor were,
however, forbidden. She took singing lessons from Harry Rich
of Toronto, whose specialty was instruction in what were
known locally as the Rich Gestures. These were movements of
the hands to signify various emotions or to make vivid some
situation. The right hand outstretched signified tender
passion. The left hand extended, with the right poised above
it, caused every member of the audience to see a bunch of
grapes. There were appropriate gestures to denote birds
flying, farewell, dawn, sorrow, and joy. For a brief time,
Beatrice received training in a Presbyterian church choir,
but there was something about her face which made small boys
in the congregation giggle and she had to be dismissed.

* * * * *

Then came the concert engagements, often with her mother and
sister. One circular describing "The Lillie Trio" has
survived and reveals that they could be engaged "as a whole,
double, or single." Beatrice was a "character costume
vocalist and impersonator" who had, according to press
notices, "a powerful voice." Another critic had pointed to
her "winsome, captivating presence...appropriate costumes
[which] make this lassie a very valuable acquisition on any
concert program." Her numbers included "Who Are You Getting
At, Eh?" (English), "My Pretty Kickapoo" (Japanese), "The
Strawberry Girl" (Yodelling Number), and "Nicoleenie"
(Italian).

Mrs. Lillie proposed that her girls should make progress
in the world, and she succeeded. Muriel became a pianist of
distinction. She composed the music for the "Nine o'Clock
Revue," which was her sister's first great triumph in London.
She was married to Arthur Weigall, the Egyptologist and
novelist. In 1920, already an ornament of the British stage,
Beatrice was married to Sir Robert Peel, fifth baronet and
grandson of the British statesman. There is a vast estate,
Drayton Manor, in the industrial section of Staffordshire.
Like nearly all British estates in these unhappy days of
depression, Drayton Manor remains closed most of the time.
A son, Robert, is in school in England when he is not visiting
his mother in the United States and will be the sixth baronet.

* * * * *

Mrs. Lillie's efforts to launch Beatrice in a stage career,
as distinct from lyceum performances, began when the
daughter was not quite sixteen and was still a serio-comic
singer. Muriel had been studying abroad with her mother. Bea
was summoned to London to make the rounds of managers, and
to experience the usual discouragements. When they listened
at all to such numbers as "Pretty Kickapoo" they said they
would let her know and never did. The truth is that her
voice was not distinguished, that her style was heavy, that
her appearance, with her hair in tight buns over her ears,
showed no promise. In desperation one day, believing that no
chance existed in any event, she decided to abandon
formality and burlesque one of her own songs. It was a
maudlin thing, about a girl leaving home. It ended with a
comic collapse on top of the suitcase which she carried.
Beatrice was promptly engaged as a comédienne, for her
auditor was the famous André Charlot. For some years she was
a moderate success. Her triumph in the "Nine o'Clock Revue"
led to the engagement for the hazardous experiment of
sending an English musical revue to the United States. It
was in January, 1924, that Americans heard that unequalled
number for the first time: Beatrice Lillie in "March with
Me." More than anything since Gilbert and Sullivan, it
convinced us that the British could laugh at themselves.

Beatrice Lillie still wore her hair long when she came to
the United States and then adopted the close, boyish cut
which goes so well with her rather large mouth and her
turn-up nose. On the stage she seems rather tall, partly
because she is so slender, but she is only five feet two or
three. Offstage, bound for the theatre, a sports suit and a
beret make her seem almost fragile. It is easier to describe
her appearance than to analyze her humor. This is more than
mere clowning, She cannot play the typical musical-comedy
part; her audience would expect her to make fun of it.
Hollywood, where she made one or two pictures, was completely
baffled by her. The gagmen were barren of suitable situations
or lines. Her _métier_ is the revue. She explains it herself
by saying that a sketch pleases her "if I am Bea Lillie in it."
She must do her own clowning, against a background of
seriousness. Amusement, synthetic or real, on the part of
anyone else on the stage ruins the effect. In general she
invents her own business. The hardest problem of all is finding
writers. Noel Coward has been successful, but in the majority
of cases she takes their raw material and beats it into shape.

* * * * *

The Lillie mood is not as broad as burlesque and somewhat
broader than satire. It is not, I think, overstatement to
say that in the hands of any other artist, no matter bow
clever, an essential ingredient would be missing. There was,
for instance, the recent occasion when Earl Carroll called
at the hospital where Miss Lillie was recuperating from an
operation. Dorothy Knapp, the publicized "Vanities" star,
had recently announced an intention to enter a convent. With
the assistance of the nurse and hurried calls upon a
costumer, Beatrice prepared for the producer's visit. When
he came in, on tiptoe as befitted a sick chamber, he saw the
figure of a nun prone on the bed, her hands folded
decorously on her breast. It does not sound very funny, but
it was. Carroll was definitely annoyed. He had planned a
stunt of his own to entertain the patient and had brought
elaborate properties with him. Two weeks later no one could
remember it. They were attempting to describe a Bea Lillie
quirk of the eyebrows underneath a nun's headdress.




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

The edition used as base for this book contained the
following error, which has been corrected:

The palace, was, of course, not her birthplace
=> The palace was, of course, not her birthplace




[End of Britain's Best, by Henry F. Pringle]